How to Integrate Healthkit Data while Developing Fitness Apps for iPhone (Tutorial)

March 9, 2019 1472

Are you a healthcare startup or an entrepreneur from the fitness industry who wants to develop fitness apps for iPhone? Then, you must check this iOS tutorial about retrieving Healthkit Data to integrate within fitness mobile app.

In this iOS healthkit tutorial, we have shared a step-by-step guide on how to access health-related data from Apple healthkit devices and integrate it into your iPhone app development project.

Before starting with the iOS tutorial, let’s understand the basic concept of Apple HealthKit.

What is HealthKit?

During the WWDC 2014 event, Apple introduced HealthKit API within iOS 8. The purpose of introducing this API was to fix the issues related to healthkit compatible apps.

HealthKit API works as a repository on Apple devices to collect, store and organize all health-related data about a person’s physical, mental or spiritual state. With the user’s permission, all healthcare apps can communicate with the HealthKit store to fetch and share their health data.

The HealthKit framework allows iPhone app developers to utilize various health-related data and create an iPhone app of their own. Though some of the health data can only be provided by the user, while a few details like heart-pulse, blood pressure can be retrieved by iPhone developers to use.

Benefits of Healthkit

One of the main benefits of using Healthkit data in apple health apps is that it stores the health-related data and makes it available for other apps to retrieve and use as per requirement. Which means that we can gather health data related to exercise or running, or cycling and integrate it into our own fitness app for the iPhone.

However, there is some sensitive or personal information collected by Healthkit data, therefore to access or utilize any such data, an iPhone app must have user’s permission.

How it Works

This tutorial has been created using Swift 4 programming language, IDE – Xcode 9 and iOS 12. Using this HealthKit demo, we will create a simple fitness tracking app feature to learn the following:

How to request permission and fetch HealthKit data from different Apple devices

How to integrate HealthKit data into an iPhone app to display data

Here, we have explained one of the features known as steps count with detailed code and the demo.

OUTPUT

Conclusion

With this Apple Healthkit Data guide, we learned how to store steps count in an iPhone app. There are other features as well which we can include and consider while developing fitness app for iPhone.

Since the release of Apple Healthkit data, it is now easy to monitor day to day health data, whether it is counting steps or checks burnt calories, or tracking sleep time. We can also store the data as per our requirement.

By using Healthkit for iOS, we can retrieve and integrate data which is already saved in the healthkit store and develop fitness app of our own. Thus, it saves a lot of time in fetching different records.

You can download the source of this iOS app tutorial from Github. Moreover, if you have any such fitness app idea and looking to convert it into a fitness iPhone app, you can get in touch with us through our contact us form. One of our sales representatives will get back to you shortly with a proposed solution. The consultation is absolutely free of cost.